Dr Gabor Maté explains the effects of the mind-body connection on stress and disease. Drawing on scientific research and decades of experience as a practising physician, he explains the effect of the mind-body link on illness and health and the role that stress plays in an array of common diseases. He promotes learning and healing, providing transformative insights into how disease can be the body’s way of saying no to what the mind cannot or will not acknowledge. Such understanding implies the purposefulness of human behaviour. Since we understand the human organism as a closed-loop system and behaviour as the indivisible whole of the internal process of acting, thinking, feeling and physiological processes that are intertwined and indivisible and characterised by creativity, we consider the idea of mind-body very close to our approach. Both concepts (mind-body and total behaviour) underscore the indivisibility of the mental and physical, meaning that the concepts of behaviour and organism are equal.

Dr Gabor Maté is a retired physician who, after 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. The bestselling author of four books published in over thirty languages, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness. For his groundbreaking medical work and writing, he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver.

The lecture was held as part of Days of Leon Lojk, a professional meeting organised every year in October by the European Institute for Reality Therapy. https://www.dnevileonalojka.si/

Leon Lojk (1937 -2014) was a Slovenian Psychologist and Psychotherapist who brought Reality Therapy to Europe and laid the ground for it to be recognised as a scientifically sound psychotherapeutic approach. He was the first president of the European Association for Reality Therapy (EART) and the founder of the European Institute for Reality Therapy.

More about reality therapy and choice theory:
https://www.eirt.si/
https://www.realitytherapy.eu/